


why don’t you come on over

by somerdaye



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 05:04:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somerdaye/pseuds/somerdaye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis is only doing it because Eleanor dared him, and it’s -- it was a joke, okay, he doesn’t understand why Harry’s so angry about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	why don’t you come on over

**Author's Note:**

> (originally posted on livejournal: 2012-06-10)

“Oh, please.” Eleanor laughs and it reverberates through Louis’ whole body from where they’re tangled up on the sofa. He tries not to get too distracted. “You wouldn’t _actually_.”

“Would too,” says Louis.

At that she gives him a look that he doesn’t have a name for, despite how many times he’s seen it. It’s something like you’re-an-idiot and I-know-something-you-don’t wrapped up in absolute mischief; she was wearing it the first time they met, and Louis thinks it’s half the reason he asked her out. (The other half was her legs, probably. He wasn’t entirely sober at the time.)

“I would,” he insists. Eleanor shakes her head and turns back to So You Think You Can Dance.

She says, “You wouldn’t dare. Not with so many people watching. Not with how _he’s_ been acting lately, all right, the fans’ll go wild.”

Well, if that isn’t a challenge, Louis doesn’t know what is.

-

Eleanor is in the crowd and from her seat in the center (though fairly far from the stage, she doesn’t have a death wish) she sees Louis step forward to sing Valerie. She giggles in anticipation and the girls beside her give her looks, but they’re a happy sort and not an I-want-you-dead sort, so she smiles at them and yells over the cheering, “He’s got something special planned tonight!”

They look, if possible, even more excited. Lord, Eleanor can’t wait to see if he really will do it, will really step out in front of thousands of girls -- and more, once the videos hit the web -- and sing those words.

He hits the chorus just as the crowd hits their peak of noise, so it’s a bit drowned out but Eleanor knows he did it, she can clearly see his mouth form the words, and there’s some muttering and a girl is screaming, “Look at Harry!” two rows up, and Harry, well, he looks sort of shocked.

She can see why. The girls are _insane_ , and when Louis gets to the second chorus and his, “I miss your curly hair and the way you hate to dress, won’t you come on over, stop making a fool outta me, why won’t you come on over, Haa-aaaarrrr-rrrryy?” is unmistakable and now Liam is crossing his arms and Niall is cracking up, dancing along to the music and Zayn has hidden his head in his hands and Eleanor can’t tell if he’s annoyed or amused.

Girls turn to look at Eleanor from all sides, open-mouthed and awaiting some kind of reaction. Jealousy, maybe, or anger. Confusion. Whatever.

Eleanor grins and whoops, waving her arms to cheer her boyfriend on.

-

Okay, so Louis is definitely looking at some backlash here. He’d forgotten, somehow, just how seriously some people take the whole Larry Stylinson thing, and he imagines that somewhere Paul is being held back from just jumping on stage and beating Louis with his own microphone.

He’ll deal with that when it comes, though, because this is _fun_.

Niall is trying to dance with Liam somewhere to his left, and Zayn has his back turned to the fans so he can hide the fit of giggles Louis knows he must be in. Louis has kept his eyes trained on Eleanor for the whole stunt, just so he can say, you know, ‘hah, challenge completed’ without actually doing so, and people in the crowd are screeching “Look at Harry!” and he thinks, all right, they just want more of a show, so his eyes search for Harry on his right and he holds his hand to his chest at the word ‘fool’.

He doesn’t know what he expects -- laughter, maybe, or some kind of over-the-top seductive expression, possibly complete with gestures that are entirely too inappropriate for their age demographic -- but he stutters over his words a little when he meets Harry’s eyes and sees the intensity there.

Harry is -- Harry is _furious_.

It’s kind of like all the bones in Louis’ legs turn to jelly, because Liam catches him even though he doesn’t quite remember falling. The girls are still screaming, though, so it was probably interpreted as a swoon to finish the song off, and Niall is clapping him on the back and Eleanor is pretending to bow to him, and Harry won’t look at him at all, now, staring out at the fans with his teeth clenched and his leg twitching. His reaction is just so _weird_. Louis only did it because Eleanor dared him, and it’s -- it was a joke, okay, he doesn’t understand why Harry’s so angry about it.

-

Harry rounds on him the moment Louis steps into their dressing room with Eleanor at his heels. “What the fuck was all that?”

“Er,” Louis says, exchanging a loaded look with Zayn, who shrugs like _it’s your problem, mate_. “It was a joke.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Harry snaps. “That’s kind of the issue here, Lou.”

It’s -- okay, Louis has seen Harry in pretty much every mood possible. He’s seen plates being thrown and heard words come out of Harry’s mouth that he wasn’t even aware existed and once heard him arguing with Gemma on the phone. Now, it’s like... all the signs of the anger are there, of course, but Louis is having a hard time finding the source of it.

Well, _Louis_ is the source of it, obviously, but he doesn’t understand what he’s done.

“What? It’s no different than ‘wrong size shoe’ or ‘I can love you more than Stan’. There’s probably going to be a lot more speculation and pointed questions in interviews but it’s not that bad, surely.”

“You’re missing the point,” says Harry, and Louis, throwing his arms up in a helpless gesture, asks what the hell the point is, then.

Harry turns his back on him, and it’s like there’s nobody else in the room. Even though he can feel Eleanor’s hand on the small of his back and hear Niall’s loud breathing and Zayn is still in his line of sight and Liam is _there_ because he must be, it doesn’t matter because Harry just _turned his back on Louis_ and that just, it doesn’t happen. No way. Never once, in all their fights, has Harry ever broken eye contact with Louis for longer than a few moments.

He always said he was hammering home his point with his eyes, so turning his back when Louis asks what his point is feels like the biggest ‘fuck you’ he can manage.

“Harry,” says Louis. He takes the few steps forward to grab Harry’s shoulders and spin him, holding on when Harry struggles. “God, what is your childhood trauma? El only dared me to change the words in a song, nothing we haven’t done plenty of times. Are you afraid of getting in trouble, or what?”

“No, you _prick_ ,” Harry says, and his voice is low and almost warning. Louis still doesn’t let his shoulders go. “You know how I feel about you, and you’re fucking laughing at me about it with your sodding girlfriend.”

“It -- what?” Louis feels like he’s missed a rather large and important chunk of the conversation. “How do you feel about me?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know.”

Louis isn’t acting. He says as much, but Harry just keeps glowering at him.

“Harry, I honestly --”

“I love you, you fucking tosser, and you bloody well _know_ that.”

It seems like the other boys and Eleanor have sucked all the air from the room and are holding it in their lungs, greedy, because Louis can’t seem to get enough. His expression, whatever it must be, makes Harry’s face go slack for a moment and then he’s blushing furiously and jerking out of Louis’ grip, practically running for the door. On the bright side, he seems to believe Louis now. On the other, he just ran off without answering any of the questions bouncing around in Louis’ brain: starting with ‘you love me?’ and ‘since when?’ and going on in that vein until he literally cannot think of anything else.

“Oh,” he says aloud. No one responds.

-

The reaction isn’t quite what Eleanor had in mind.

See, it’s like this: Girl meets boy. Boy asks girl out. They go on a couple of dates and discover they get on well. Then enters Harry Styles.

Eleanor has known from the second she met Harry that getting serious with Louis would put them all through a world of hurt. She remembers the way Louis slung an arm around Harry’s shoulders and introduced him as his life partner, the stars in Harry’s eyes when he smiled back. She remembers thinking _wow, I can’t compete with that_.

It had been starting to get frustrating, though. Months and months and _months_ and Louis either didn’t know or didn’t care, and the more she got to know him the more unlikely the latter seemed. And at this point, right now, she’s so tired of it all; the girls who hate her blindly and that split second where she’ll enter a room and Harry’s smile will falter because he knows Louis’ attention will be torn from him. It’s always tugged at her heartstrings but lately she’s just wanted to cry whenever she thinks about the seventeen-year-old with stars in his eyes because every time she does she remembers thinking _wow_ and she’ll bet her entire life’s savings that Harry thought the same thing.

She’s ready for it all to be over with, really. She wants to go home and live her life without tweets telling her to go kill herself and invite Danielle over for tea so she can applaud her for putting up with it all for so long.

“I’m not splitting up with you because of what happened tonight,” she starts the conversation off the moment she closes Louis’ hotel room door behind her. He looks up from the window, startled. “I’m splitting up with you because I’ve been meaning to for a while. It’s not -- you’re lovely, you really are, I just. I’m ready for my life to move _on_ from One Direction, do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” he says. He sounds distant and not very surprised.

Eleanor comes to sit on his bed, close enough that she can twine the fingers of her right hand with his left. “I’m sorry, Lou.”

“You knew, didn’t you?” When she furrows her brow, he expounds, “About Harry. About the -- the feelings he has that I _must_ have known about because nobody’s that stupid, right? Is that what the Valerie thing was about?”

“Yeah,” she admits. “You were taking a little long to catch on.”

“How long have you --”

“Moment I met him.” Her firm response has Louis sucking in a breath and closing his eyes. “I remember, yeah, that I thought -- wow. I can’t compete with that. I remember I told myself getting too serious with you would be a bad idea for everyone involved.”

He laughs, shakily. “And that worked out really splendidly, didn’t it?”

“It did,” she says. He opens his eyes to fix her with an incredulous look. “It _was_ a bad idea for everyone involved.”

After a murmured agreement, they fall into silence. She can tell Louis is thinking hard as he stares down at their interlocked fingers, and she doesn’t want to interrupt that. It’s not just -- she knows it’s not just the my-best-friend-fancies-me thing, since there’s all these _layers_ when it comes to Louis and Harry, what with the fanbase and the other boys and management and Eleanor herself, and it must be a lot to sort through, so she just watches his expression change and waits for his verdict.

When he looks up, eyes clear, and says, “You going to try and catch the red-eye flight or do you want me to book you a separate room?”, she can’t help but laugh aloud.

-

Louis has come to this grand epiphany, watching Eleanor pack her things and chatter away about everything she plans to do when she gets home, and it feels kind of monumental, life-changing, and _Harry isn’t answering his goddamn door._

“I know you’re in there, Haz, I can hear you watching Terminator!”

In true Harry fashion, the volume only gets louder, and in true Louis fashion, he knocks hard enough to break the door if, you know, he were the Hulk. Harry yells a string of curse words and, all right, if that’s how he wants to play it.

“Since I’ve come on tour, well my body’s been a mess,” he sings as loud as he possibly can, hoping the sound will penetrate not only the hotel walls but also Harry’s thick skull. “And I miss your curly hair, and the way you hate to dress. Won’t you open your door, you’re making a fool out of me!”

Before he can continue, Liam’s door opens across the hall and he scolds, “You’re going to get us kicked out.”

“Oh, come on,” Niall’s voice whines from somewhere in Liam’s room. “It was just getting good!” Louis can hear Zayn agreeing from within as well, and wonders if Harry can hear them too. He takes a deep breath to wail Harry’s name but before he can, the door opens and the boy himself appears, rumpled and annoyed.

“Louis, I don’t want --”

Whatever Harry planned on saying is swallowed by Louis’ lips, and he can hear Liam groaning that he doesn’t need to see them snogging, thanks, which causes Niall to make a noise like a wounded moose and, judging by the thumps, race to the door and see for himself. Now Zayn is making a lot of noise, too, and possibly they will get thrown out of yet _another_ hotel, but Harry is sighing into Louis’ mouth and resting his palms on Louis’ waist, so it doesn’t seem like a priority to get them to shut up.

Louis doesn’t really expect Harry to push him away, but that’s what he does, a strange expression on his face.

“Don’t do this to Eleanor,” he says, and Louis laughs.

“Eleanor, as it turns out,” he says, letting his own arms rest on Harry’s shoulders like they’re dancing, “is president of the Larry Stylinson fanclub. Valerie was her way of telling me I’m an idiot.”

“Well, you are an idiot.”

Louis doesn’t mind Harry calling him names, so long as he _always_ follows the insults with a searing kiss.  
  



End file.
